peripheral
by hewhoistomriddle
Summary: Just when you thought you were out, you're in. Unrelated drabbles.
1. Nana

Written for **theirempires. **Prompt was _birds_.

Nana. Hen. _She doesn't ask for much_.

* * *

Nana doesn't ask much.

She doesn't ask much from life, only, perhaps, a good home in a good city; Tsuna discovering that things that make life wonderful, have him feeling the exhiliration, the zest, the _joy _of being alive; a little bit of romance, a little bit of mystery, _just a little bit_, to remind her of the sharper, more fleeting kind of happiness – it had felt a little like wind, a little like motorcycles, if she remembered correctly – that she gave up for the softer, golden glow of settled-down bliss.

She doesn't ask much from her husband, just enough to pay the bills with a comfortable amount left over, an occassional phone call, his strong voice on the line, saying he's okay, he's fine, _everything's going well, don't worry_. She doesn't need fortunes or lovely silk dresses or glittering trinkets from all over the world, doesn't need _position_, doesn't need overwhelming wealth or power or underground armies or the world's eye on her.

She doesn't ask much from her son, just passing grades and his continued existence, that he makes friends and be happy and grow up with a sense of worth. She doesn't need for answers, not for his lingering absernces and troubled gazes, not for the crowd of characters he brings home with him, not for the fact that he doesn't flinch very often anymore, like he'd seen things.

Nana didn't ask, she accepted, took in the world with her whole heart, and stayed content.


	2. Tsuna

_Tsuna doesn't remember Italy._

* * *

Sawada Tsunayoshi does not remember Italy.

He lives in Japan, has lived there for as long as he could imagine, a painfully ordinary existence where nothing seemed more important than surviving another class, trying to shake off his loser reputation and seeing Sasagawa Kyoko's smile.

He does not remember a golden summer spent just off the Mediterranean coast, in a villa enfolded in grassy hills where horses roamed and vineyards that stretched for miles. He does not remember being held aloft over a sea of rooftops made cerise by the setting sun, the long shadows of men in black suits lingering under the Venetian archways with their ears perked and guns ready, carven doors clicking shut as his father's voice says -

_I'll just be a minute, Tsuna._

He does not remember Italy and its ancient cities and alleys and waterways, the way it stretched out an open hand to him in reverence and sighed feather-like kisses unto his brow.


	3. Lambo

_Lambo and those trips back.

* * *

_

Lambo sometimes wonders how long he could _stand_ the past. No longer than five minutes, perhaps.

He tries to keep it together, drapes everything over with nonchalance and mild airheadedness, just stopping short of keeping the bitterness from his tone whenever he goes back to the golden years, to act like being ignored and ridiculed are worthy of crying like they were ten years ago, to check himself from saying anything potentially time-wrecking and universe-crashing, to not revere the ordinary mundane things the guardians his age are taking entirely for granted.

It's unspeakably hard, so hard sometimes that it chokes his throat and tears his eyes, because in his time, his family's being slaughtered by Millefiore, the future is a ruined world and _this_, the past, is just a broken promise.


	4. Yamamoto

_Yamamoto would just smile._

**

* * *

**

Reborn remarked how you weren't as fit to be a baseball player as you were to be a hitman.

And, well, isn't that a shame, because somehow the _thrill of the kill _– if there were even such a thing, you don't know, you've never tried to think on it – just doesn't measure up to the heartpounding feel of the bat in your hand, staring grim-eyed at your opponent, when the world just stops and spins and ends at the homeplate and all bets are off, it's no longer a game but your existence hanging on the line.

You look to the kid, the adult-child who's seen more nightmares than you can dream of, wondering if you could make him understand; something about the way he holds himself warns you off immediately.

Reborn had never seen a world that is not spidered by death and revenge and assassination, and he will not appreciate your efforts to enlighten him.


	5. Mammon

_Mammon, pure headcanon._

* * *

Viper doesn't want to grow up poor.

He decides this as he sits in the thin shadow of an olive tree that grew itself along the hills of Italy, eyes steady as his telekinesis curls with the heavy scent of orange blossoms and permeates the gaily-painted carriage of the wealthy travellers. The waterfalling clinks of silver coins pouring from a fat pouch onto the roadside is music to his ears.

He walks over the mound, his adolescent body gaunt and clothed in the cheap garb of peasants. Starvation had wrought itself on his skin, and quickly, lest he be branded a bandit and accosted, he counts out the money.

In terms of food, It's not enough. _Never _enough.

Just this morning he'd crossed paths with the local Mafioso, who'd taken one good look at him, young bones nearly splintered by the beam of poverty, and offered him a good meal if Viper would do him a few paltry errands. He'd refused the offer, in a roundabout way so as not to offend, but the shameful quality of kindness grates on his nerves still.

Viper frowns. He knows he is strong, _special_. He is not one of those peasants who hold to their gods and saints and angels an empty promise of deliverance, he is not a petty thief, he is not a – _charity case. _Several weeks ago he had succeeded in making himself vanish completely and recently he had managed to make a spectral copy of himself. His illusions are yet imperfect; the enemy too often know they are being deceived, even if they are helpless to the deception.

In the eyes of the simple-minded, he'd been the devil's child.

But time came when someone else had noticed his potential and, over an elaborate breakfast in a grove that stretched out as far as the eye could see, a member of the Vongola Famiglia had mentioned the possibility of an _opening_. Viper barely heard him; he'd had to force himself to eat slowly, sparingly, to stem the greed that gnawed like acid in his stomach, to focus instead on the subtle gilded edges of the silver knife, the _wealth _of it.

Viper had long decided that only money held a certain resonance with him. Solid, tangible, _existing_ - position and power can be taken away, suddenly, inexplicably, but money will hold value as long as the world continued to hold to the illusory worth of mere minted paper.

Viper doesn't want to grow up poor and this man had offered him a revelation.

Power translated to money, and Viper was determined to accumulate as much power as he could.


	6. Alaude

_Alaude, Giotto and mutual nenefits._**

* * *

**

As always, the meeting with Giotto is a tense affair, despite the deceptive lushness of the venue: an old, abandoned vineyard now teeming with spring's gaudy creations. Alaude would've chosen to drop the matter altogether, if the sudden aggression between two powerful, hot-blooded alliances didn't threaten to spill blood on the soil he considered his own.

As ugly as it was to subscribe to lesser ideals upon occasion, Alaude knew very well the convenience of being the Vongola Primo's Cloud Guardian. He was, after all, two feet in the agency of government which sough to keep open eyes on the land bathed in daylight and deceit, and one powerful hand in the inky shadows of the world that ran through Italy's back alleys.

He is Head of Intelligence, and under his him, an inifinite web of resources and informers and hideouts. But he is too well-versed in the law of silence, _omerta, _that saturated itself in the bones of his countrymen and clamped their jaws shut in memory of the centuries-old hatred for authority, to imagine that it is enough. The power of the Vongola will pry open those jaws and those secrets.

Alaude holds Giotto's gaze above the rim of his wineglass, eyes a sardonic gray as he makes the barest motion of a toast, a decision is made and civilizations sigh into the backs of their clasped hands.


	7. Ipin

_I-pin. Forgive and forget._

* * *

_What do you when the best years of your life happened too young? _

_And when they're over you realize that what had been fun for you could appropriately be translated into cruelty?  
_

I-pin tries to forget. She dresses herself in bright, preppy clothing and wears a constant smile. She burrows herself into her textbooks and into friends and into normalcy as best as she could. But sometimes, it's difficult to make her limbs realize she's not being attacked anymore, to forget that she's allowed to feel emotions normally, rather than to clinically partition them for later, to remember that the flash of metal off the school railings is not light reflecting off the barrel of a gun. Her body still thinks she's an assassin, and reacts in reflex, and it saddens her, more than a little.

I-pin tries to forgive. But to forgive oneself is one of the hardest things to do; she can never know the measure of her own bias and sometimes she catches herself thinking of the lives she's taken, there is a grim resentful edge to those thoughts, and condemnation. She avoids thinking of this, because they are a trigger to something bigger and darker, and I-pin knows just how laughably easy it is to self-destruct. But when the guilt gets too much, she talks to Uncle Kawahira, who understands what it means to have been thrust too young into a violent world, and the need to make amends.

Over miso ramen, he tells her to join the disciplinary committee, for a start.


	8. Tsuna 2

_Tsunayoshi, in high school._

* * *

Middle school and Sawada Tsunayoshi had been unremarkable, his classmates remember. _No-Good Tsuna_, a small, unmotivated cohort who drifted through school and life without any genuine interest in making a difference, convinced of his own triviality in the greater scheme of the world, without that sense of judging and comparing that seemed manifest in all humans, defeatist and contemptible.

Then something happened in a world they couldn't see, and No-Good Tsuna suddenly had followers and a spine and a light in his eyes that burned like a fiery arc in the sky, and the boy who had always willingly swayed to circumstances had become unbendable, had started to fight back, staked his claim and scorched a mark in the world.

Sawada Tsunayoshi was suddenly terrifying.

High school and Sawada Tsunayoshi had been compelling, despite how unassuming he acted; there was something worldly in the set of his shoulders, the quiet manner, the circle of friends that surrounded him as a cold, impregnable wall. His eyes had been amber and old in their understanding, his hands cast with rings too subtle to be of little worth, and his favor worthy to be earned.

Something had happened, though they didn't know it, didn't think about it, and it made itself known sometimes: foreign cars lingering just out the school, angry black streaks on the pavement like a bomb had gone off, shifty men in black suits, shifty women, even shiftier _children_. Respect, however begrudged or confounding, rode on the actions of all who acquainted themselves with him, coated their words and straightened their postures.

Sawada Tsunayoshi could never be forgettable.


	9. Vendicare

_Vendicare, not necessarily Mukuro._

* * *

The man lives in a water tank deep beneath the earth, buried alive, in a darkness total and womblike. He wears a metal mask that feeds him oxygen and silences his screams, shackles that lock and criscross his arms, padded clothing to dull touch, earplugs. He does not remember the sensation of sight nor sound nor texture, cannot remember light nor movement nor pain; he cannot reconstruct it, and his mind is imprisoned as much as his physical body. His muscle atrophies, his bones bow beneath the softened flesh, every limb dying, falling into an unholy sleep in the water, the tepid water, unbearable and cloying with the slick of despair. His mind is going, his intellect fading, and he is spiralling into a gripless insanity.

Imprisonment in Vendicare equaled the necrosy of the human spirit. It is the price to be paid for abominable treachery in the unkind world of mafia. He did not know, did not imagine how hell could be until he watched the last rectangle of dull light vanish, like staring at a gray unforgiving sky from beneath the surface of an iced lake, before falling, before drowning.

He had been there less than a week.


	10. GammaAria

_Gamma/Aria. Mermaids._

* * *

Gamma heard her laughter before he first saw her. It was bright and effusive and it bubbled over the green grass of the hills with the breeze. A siren's call, and it bound every thread of his existence around her.

Aria moved with the grace and purpose of rushing rivers, turquoise and whitewater-magnificent, with the economy of movement of a true Mafia boss. Smooth gestures with her fingers, a chin turned just _so_, a quick appearance of a frown line; small movements, like silver scales briefly flashing in the hazylight, all with their own liquid meanings and messages.

Aria often wore pearls in occassions which required her to exchange the floppy white hats for more elegant, classic attires: translucent swathes of silk, dark evening gowns with wide slashes for easy running, strappy heels. The pearls winked at people from her throat and her ears, lustrous against her dark hair, and gave Aria an air of calm and mystery, like a tide pool in the evening.

Gamma only called Aria a mermaid only once, because he really imagined she was that, a woman of myth and beauty and indescribable danger. He regretted it as he knelt by her sickbed, a sidearm digging into his ribs and a ring that burned on his finger, gazing into Aria's eyes bluer than Italy's sky, bluer than the deep sea. _Mermaid_, he had called her, in a teasing mood a long time ago, forgetting that mermaids were ethereal, creatures of mist and sea fog and the mystical ocean, not long for the earth, and eventually fade to sea foam in the hands of men.

(His heart is a wasteland and the sky overhead and in her eyes turns gray and thin as the sea leeches her away.)


	11. Gokudera

_Gokudera. Piano man._

* * *

The music teacher is infinitely surprised when he finds that Gokudera Hayato of all people plays the piano, and plays it _well_, plays it as natural as breathing. _Gokudera Hayato_ who is rude and slouches on his desk and refuses to offer a modicum of civility to authority.

He is endlessly baffled by it - refusing to concur with the young ladies' giggling claims of the boy's innate genius - it is quite an enigmatic turn for the Italian delinquent to have a class talent, his hands belonging with the elegant ivory keys as they belonged with painfully-loud punk rings and cigarette sticks.

He will never know, of course, of the boy's blood that ran thick with music, of days and days spent with a beautiful, barely-remembered mother, their hands clasped in belting out a harmony that swirled with flowing sunlight, of countless masters across Europe honing his skills to a crescendo worthy of castle ballrooms lit with thousands and thousands of lights.

He will never know, will never understand, and merely continue sharing rueful bewilderment with the maths teacher, who has roughly the same problem.


	12. Gokudera 2

_Gokudera. Prince and Pauper._

* * *

Hayato doesn't mind how dishwater leaves its stain on his hands, nor how rain tangles in his hair, nor how there's never a place open for him, never an inch of space cleared. In fact, he welcomes it, the stench of independence, and the gritty feel of a world doused in misery and cold rain and cigarette smoke.

But some things bothered him - the beat-up old piano in the last shithole he'd worked in, the one which felt like old wood and like it still had a ability to carry a tune and a story, if he'd let it - the sight of soft-silk hair and delicate fingers, of the sunlight flashing off silk dresses, of lips ripe as grapes in vaguely-remembered faces - the kindness of ignorant strangers, who'd offer him a coin or two when he was down on his luck, smiling encouragingly on the downtrodden kid on the doorstep, feeling the glow of their christian charity, because they didn't know he was - or rather, had been - _Gokudera_, old weath and castles with turrets and armies, a childhood of tossing airplanes over a vast courtyard and riding the Italian fields on the backs of princes.


	13. Aria

_Aria, flaws.

* * *

_

Uni was a princess, but Aria, Aria was not.

Aria had been a flame, fearlessly bright, soothing and warm, fierce and ferocious, at intervals, rarely steady, like fading footsteps along the shore, lighter than the sun and more transient than the mist, despite the shackles that were her pride and her loves and her rich history.

Aria had been an inelegant child and an even more awkward teenager, seemingly born without the grace that ran deep in the Giglio Nero, but the years had been insidiously kind, and she'd somehow managed to fit into those finely-controlled angles of her mother, and wear the cloud of her hat, without suspiciously knocking it over.

Aria had been a _terrible_, _humiliating _boss, too wise beyond her years, too much clarity in her emotions and loyalties, too trigger-happy on happiness.

And, on a white silken bed, in the fresh sprigs of spring, Aria had died a lonely death, surrounded by family and loved beyond measure. 


	14. Giglio Nero

_Giglio Nero. Gamma/Aria. Wartime._

* * *

The Gesso Famiglia declares sudden war one night in one of Italy's numerous back-alleys, two clicks and gunsmoke, the message is written in smeared-blood, all over the morning headlines.

Over the bitter aroma of morning coffee, sitting at a table in a gazebo, Aria cries into her sleeve. Gamma speaks rapidfire Italian into a cellphone, words crashing into each other like trains, electricity sizzling off his skin almost perceptibly.

_War_, and in the mafia, this is death carried by the rain of bullets, or suddenly blinding headlights on a dark street, on the fragile scent of almonds from dead-blue lips, on the rope, on bombs. Disappearances. Fishes tied up in a coat. It is unthinkable that in the midst of all this, it is _illness _which takes Aria away.

When they buried her, the Gesso sent lilies, white and tragically fragile, six wreaths of it, and the flowers smell of mockery. Gamma thinks of Aria's smile rotting in the earth and -

Something breaks.


	15. MukuroChrome

_Mukuro. Chrome. Pretentious crap._

* * *

Sometimes, when Mukuro cares to pause, he notices that somewhere along the line, Chrome has become, somewhat, distressingly competent.

Indeed, she plucks those lovely little mists with fine control and finer timing, and it is a skill that is almost as magnificent as her raw, inelegant power when they allowed it to run untethered as a wild beast, uncharted as a monsoon.

She is longer a thin, awkward adolescent, blind to the world and her own potential, in need of him to berate her childishness over silly things like, say, bullying.

_(It is a particularly peculiar point with female illusionists. Snakes and stone may break your bones but names will never hurt you except for when it might cause you to sew patches over your own eyes and turn your bones to vines and crack open the earth beneath. You are an illusionist, Nagi, and your reality shall always be molded to what you think.) _

_(So what is your concern that she said the devil was in you? She was right.)_

She does not need him anymore except that she _does_. Because, in her mind - a beautifully brittle place he frequents perhaps too often - she needs him because a debt is a debt is a soul-sealing debt that isn't paid until she's dead and mist and even beyond that.

* * *

_(Mukuro-sama.)_


End file.
